Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer: Palantir's AI in Action

Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer was established last year, adding a new competitor to the legal sector with approximately 2,700 lawyers and over $2 billion in revenue. The firm has recruited Ilona Logvinova, who built her career as an in-house lawyer at Mastercard before joining McKinsey & Company, where she led technology adoption in the legal sector. She is now tasked with leading the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) tools within the firm.

According to Logvinova, these AI tools are easy to license, but the real challenge lies in behavior change. She emphasizes that law is a profession that has not changed for several hundred years, which represents a tremendous opportunity. Her title as Global Head of AI is significant, as it sends a message to employees and clients: integrating AI into lawyers' work is no longer an experiment, but an imperative.

The risk for any firm rushing to adopt new technologies is that the software becomes unused. Law firms invest a lot of money in new tools, but not all see the necessary usage to justify these costs. Logvinova states that one of her missions is to ensure this does not happen at HSF Kramer, drawing inspiration from Palantir's model.

She leads a team she calls "deployed legal engineers," internal specialists whose job is to sit with lawyers (and sometimes clients), observe how work is actually done, and then integrate AI into those routines so that it is effectively used. This concept echoes Palantir's deployed engineer model, where technicians integrate with clients to implement software in real-world conditions. HSF Kramer is one of the firms adapting this structure to law.

Logvinova points out that clients will push law firms to use the latest technologies, provide the best service, and compete with other firms. Recently, the firm has rolled out Legora, a growing startup in the legal tech space, across the enterprise. Legora claims that its software can handle some of the most monotonous tasks of a lawyer, such as document review, contract comparison, legal research, and drafting briefs.

Logvinova provided a hypothetical example of how the firm's legal engineers could make the tool more useful. For instance, if a debt financing partner wants to upload a term sheet into Legora and receive a summary in table form, the partner knows the desired outcome but not how to get the system to produce it. This is where the legal engineer comes in, translating the lawyer's objective into a workflow that will actually be used.

HSF Kramer has declined to name other software providers it uses, which is not surprising in a market where many large firms are simultaneously testing competing tools. With technology evolving so rapidly, firms are trying to keep their options open, fearing committing too early to a platform that may seem obsolete in a year.

Logvinova states that there is no manual for this position, which is why she has begun to view it less as a software purchase and more as a choice of companies to bet on. She spends a significant amount of her time exploring the market, meeting founders, and tracking product roadmaps. She adopts an approach that does not see this as a ready-to-use SaaS purchase. The tools used by HSF Kramer today, she adds, "should be the worst of the technology" and improve "every hour of every day."